A technique for detecting a position of a face or an eye of a human from an image including the face of the human is known. For example, JP2000-137792A describes a technique for continuously and correctly detecting an eye by extracting an edge line corresponding to an upper eyelid and an edge line corresponding to a lower eyelid from a face image, by generating a template thereof and matching the template to a candidate of the eye.
However, in the technique of JP2000-137792A, correlative operation is performed for matching the template. Accordingly, a processing time tends to be long. Therefore, the operation of the technique of JP2000-133792A is difficult for an in-vehicle CPU, of which a processing speed is low. Further, using a dedicated computing unit tends to cause high cost.
A need thus exists for an eyelid detection apparatus, an eyelid detection method and a program therefor which is not susceptible to the drawback mentioned above.